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Battle of Endor: In praise of the Ewoks

Ewoks present a complicated series of sub messages within the short space of the Endor ground battle. At first, they’re dismissed as short furry help (better than no help at all), when in reality, the Ewoks had effectively neutralised the Rebels, and given the Rebels proceeded to trounce the Empire, it’s a fair and furry bet that Ewok v Rebels would end poorly for the Rebels. Ewok v. Empire is always advantage Ewok. See, the thing about the Ewoks is the constant under estimation of the ability, their technology, and their low metal / non electronics combat systems against a high tech force with defenses tailored to high tech attacks. The Empire probably had landmines, radar, laser trips and all the rest of the anti-vehicle technology you could want to stop snowspeeders, AT-ST, AT-AT, X-wing and Y-Wing. I doubt that they had something that would pick up an organic component hangglider on radar. Even if you credit the Empire with IR/heat sensors, the Endor moon would be a messy place to put that sort of visual equipment into effect in the daylight.

In the Return of the Jedi, do the Ewoks present with distinct forms types of combat strategy. Ewok v Ewok, Ewok v Empire Vehicle, and Ewok v Empire Troops.
1. Ewok v EwokCombat

The use of gliders, catapults and spears which were largely ineffective against the Empire‘s vehicles indicated that the Ewok clan that allied with the Rebels had weapons that were designed to a semi-medieval level (catapult), and post-medieval (gliders). The gliders could be a specific repurpose of civilian Ewok flight gear (tree to tree transport, intra-village travel). The weaponised response could be an effort to combat the Empire with the assistance of the Rebels. The catapults look well suited to attacking other Ewok villages, given the arc like nature of the payloads, which would allow for strikes in the distance and well above the heads of Ewok ground troops. Storming an Ewok village up the ramps and bridges would probably be a high injury / high fatality proposal, assuming the bridges and access points weren’t able to be withdrawn/destroyed by the defenders.

The Ewoks beat the Rebels and beat the Empire. They're hard core.

2. Ewok v Empire Vehicles

The Ewoks had built specific purpose traps and weaponised ambush points for destroying the AT-ST chicken walkers. The proximity of the traps to the Imperial base indicates that the Empire and the Ewoks have had a steady detente with a limited Empire territory and established no-go zone for various Empire equipment. It’d also explain the presence of the seriously heavy duty AT-AT on a “friendly” world such as Endor. The AT-ST losses to the Empire from the Ewoks probably introduced a code of conduct amongst the pilots to avoid certain zones which was overriden by the pressing need to track down the Rebel troops.
3. Ewok v Empire hand to hand

The Ewoks clearly knew how to exploit the armour weaknesses of the stormtroopers. Deploying bolas for headshots, dropping nets and rocks, and specifically focusing on head trauma to reduce the effectiveness of the armour indicates some experience at ambush patrols. Plus, given the way the Ewok intended to kill and grill the captured rebel troops, it’s a fair bet that a few Empire troops were trapped and roasted by the Ewoks. Plus, there were specific anti-speeder bike traps and defensive strategies put into effect by Ewok ground troops. Again, there’s a canon body of evidence to suggest the Ewoks had previously killed Empire troops. That Threepio was able to convince them to fight for the Rebels was a further indication of the Ewok-Empire animosity.

I’ve always wondered how the failure to land the Tydirium on an official Empire landing pad didn’t set off massive alarms in the Empire chain of command. If any aircraft didn’t make their booked flight plan in most controlled airspaces (and the Empire had a set of space controllers on Vader’s command ship who were responsible for the shield access. They’d hand off the planet bound flight to a domestic airspace controller who’d guide the Tydirium through Endor flight paths to a destination. Assuming that our contemporary views of military air traffic control applied to the Empire). I’ve wondered recently if the Tydirium didn’t report an engine failure, or some other half-mayday call, set down in the clearing, and then have thre Empire discover the abandoned shuttle with a speeder bike patrol reporting another set of civilians (parts and tecnical crew for the forest moon was the alleged cargo) lost to the damn Ewoks.

Death from Above.

The idea of the Ewoks as a peaceful bundle of cute furry merchandise in waiting bothers me, because it says that the viewer of ROTJ can’t see past the humans to look at the complexity of the battlefield. The nature of battle indicates that there’s inter-tribe warfare at a fairly sophisticated level of seige engines and air support (and presumably, counter attacks to the seige/air approaches), since these were readily available Ewok weapons brought to the battlefield quite quickly. This was an armed tribe who were willing to mix it up with the Empire who had the ranged weapons on their side – and the Ewoks were still willing to bring it to the battle and more than hold their own in the fight.

Pear Analytics Twitter Report: Criticisms of the coding methods

Pear Analytics produced a study about the usage of Twitter, and I fear they reveal more about their own organisational ability than then do anything about Twitter. I’ve read the public white paper, and I’m finding myself doubting the value of the report simply on the basis of the categorisation Pear used for their twitter coding. To describe it as limited, overly broad and prone to motivational bias is a charitable way of saying it’s poor quality, and I’d send it back for revision if this was a conference paper, and bounce the damn thing straight to reject if it was a journal article. (Don’t really want to think about the pain I’d inflict on a student who turned this in as an essay).

Discussion of the Categories

(1) News: Any sort of main stream news that you might find on your national news stations such as CNN, Fox or others. This did not include tech news or social media news that you might find on TechCrunch or Mashable.

So by news, they don’t actually mean news that would be “news” in a social media community. Fair enough. If “social media news” is excluded here, where was it included? Specifically, there’s also something suspect about the division of news content in this manner – does this include original news such as the Hudson River tweet, Iran elections, election coverage, sports reports and score updates from live events? Is it restricted to the rebroadcast of news articles with short URLs? Can blog posts of original opinion columns similiar to those located in the websites of major news stations? Is it video/visual/audio news rather than text? The selection of CNN, Fox or others indicates a bias towards the television style news rather than the print media – which is odd for a written medium. I have doubts over the nature of this category, and believe it may significantly under report.

(2) Spam: These are the tweets such as “See how I got 3,000 followers in one day” type of tweets.

Fair definition. Although I wonder where the line was drawn for content coding – did this include the keyword spam accounts who send @messages based on automated keyword triggers? Or did those @spam triggers fall into the conversation category? Minor question, and I think this is a fair and well set up definition.

(3) Self?Promotion: These are typical corporate tweets about products, services, or “Twitter only” promos.

Did this include press releases, blog post updates (like the one that appears on Twitter for this post) and private user self-promotion? For example, when I talk about social marketing course work, or presenting at a conference, or announcing an attendance at an event, did I sit in the corporate self promotion? As with news, I think this category is possibly under-reporting, and I suspect some of the self-promotional was counted as conversational.

(4) Pointless Babble: These are the “I am eating a sandwich now” tweets.

If I believe that this was the singular use of the category, I’d still have concerns. I freely admit to “pointless babble” posts which have sparked long conversations, been retweeted and more than a few times, a single silly tweet from me has more traffic and mileage than my “serious” tweets. I’d also be interested to see whether this category included any tweets with hashtags – eg the livebloogging of a conference. Liveblogging isn’t news, spam or self-promotion, and the stuff I did under the #INSM09 tag doesn’t count as conversation either. Was it pointless babble? Possibly, except that it was a rationale for a lot of people to start following that account.

(5) Conversational: These are tweets that go back and forth between folks, almost in an instant message fashion, as well as tweets that try to engage followers in conversation, such as questions or polls. Note: Now, if there were any tweets that could fit into more than one category (which was rare), if it started with “@”, we deemed it as conversational, even if it was a news item or self?promotion.

A good piece of clarification that conversational could absorb tweets from any other category area just by virtue of having an @ or being a question or poll. I think this category grossly overreports, and absorbs from other areas – I’m suspicious that a question can be conversational in nature,

(6) Pass?Along Value: These are any tweets with an “RT” in it.

A rebroadcast tweet counts as a pass-along. Fair enough. But what about the RT of a “pointless babble” tweet? Would a RT mean the original tweet has value to the ReTweeter, and therefore, requires a new category? I would also have liked to known where the 8.70% of RT originated from – conversation, babble selfpromotion or news?

Broad Concerns with the study

1) What value was placed on hashtags and URL shortening? You’ve recognised RT and @, how about the other advance use behaviours?

2) Which category contains the “tech news” or “social media news” that you might find on TechCrunch or Mashable? Did it become an RT once @Mashable/@Techcrunch posted it, and sit inside self promotion initially? Was it classified as a conversational once people talked about it? Given original statements of tech news or social media news was were explicitly excluded from being news (despite the fact you can find tech news and social media news on News Corporation owned news sites), it would have been nice to have a statement in the white paper about where these items were included.

3) Defining all other categories as “pointless babble” strikes me as a case of over-reporting to create a desired result, rather than actually assessing the state of play of the Twitter content. To demonstrate this possible problem, I coded the Foxtel Television channels for content within the existing twitter categories. Given it’s a one way broadcast medium, I declined to allocate “Conversational” to any channel.

10%   News (any recognised news network channel)
34%   Pointless Babble (anything not classfied elsewhere)
10%   Pass along value (the +2 channels)
41%   Self promotion (any named or branded channel such as National Geographic, MTV, Fox* or Discovery)
5%   Spam (pay per view or home shopping)

* Fox News was counted as self promotion since it’s a for-profit entertainment network rather than a legitimate news media outlet.

Is Australian television mostly pointless babble and self promotion? Well, that depends – I deliberately didn’t cast Fox Sport as news since it’s a named self promoting outlet, and if I recode sport broadcasts as news channels, then news forges ahead to 18%, pointless babble sits at 34% and self promotion drops to 30%. So TV is just pointless babble and self promotion, and has no merit, right? The content classification approach is problematic at times, particularly when there’s a considerably negatively worded catch-all category to pick up the unclassified. Incorporating a judgemental categorisation system designed to condemn rather than report will bias the overall outcome – for example, if I change one label, the summary of the results changes remarkably

(1) News 3.6%
(2) Spam 3.75%
(3) Self Promotion 5.85%
(4) Collective Goods of Value (Pointless Babble) 40.55%
(5) Conversational 37.55%
(6) Pass?Along Value 8.70%

Suddenly Twitter is the most vital thing ever if you want community since it’s so vibrant if you take Rheingold (1993) “collective goods of value” as the interpretation of the statement about what you’re having for lunch, along with the existing massive conversation structure. Since conversation and collective goods of value are precursor conditions for the creation of cybercommunity, then Twitter is the perfect cyber community incubator system. If you code “Misc.other” as the foundation tools for a community, it’s all good.If you’ve decided that Twitter is a waste time/space/bandwidth, and arrived at the study with a preset attitude and a desire to prove the waste of space hypothesis, setting a broad classification of “Pointless Babble” is a great way to prove your point, and demonstrate some poor levels of market research, analysis and analytical thinking.

Plus, at 40.55%, I believe there would have been an opportunity to start digging deeper into the nature of these “pointless babble” posts to separate them into Facebook update style “I am here with Y, doing X” and “letting you know I’m alive and okay”, truely recognised as “babble” (cat posts, misposts, and other apparently “useless” content), the social network ping command versus recommendations, shoutouts jokes and fourth-wall breaking messages.

Clustering it all under “babble” shows a lack of investigative desire to actively pursue a more meaningful investigation of the content of the twitterstream. It’s a shame, because with a more active method, a deeper interrogation of the data and a bit of desire, Pear Analytics should be able to produce something remarkable from what they’ve captured.

ETA: Sarah Monahan has been in contact to let me know she’s no longer with Pear Analytics.

ETA2: Pear Analytics responded to some of the community comments on their report on their blog.

References

Experience: The Blog: Twitter’s 40.55% “Pointless Babble”: The Insights Mainstream Media Missed, http://www.experiencetheblog.com/2009/08/twitters-4055-pointless-babble-insights.html (Accessed: Sat Aug 15 2009 16:47:44 GMT+1000 (AUS Eastern Standard Time)

Twitter Study Reveals Interesting Results About Usage | Pear Analytics, http://www.pearanalytics.com/2009/twitter-study-reveals-interesting-results-about-usage/
Sat Aug 15 2009 16:46:52 GMT+1000 (AUS Eastern Standard Time)

Rheingold, H. (1993) The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. New York: Harper Collins

Team Fortress II: Falling off the wagon errr little kart

I’m back playing Team Fortress II after a several month layoff from the game, and it’s good to be back. The heavies are pleased to see the return of the Pyro-medic, so long as I push little kart!

steeeveen is looking good!

That said, not every class will be pleased to see me back in game.

Returns as a pyro means a lot less happy snipers on the other teams.

Returning as a pyro means a lot less happy snipers on the other teams.

It’s been a few months since I last played semi-regularly. The important thing for me to remember is that I might have to take some time to recover my skills in the game…..

Or maybe not

Team Fortress 2. It’s not just about the hats, unlocks, classless update, and the new maps. It’s about the sensibility of laughing hysterically at getting killed in extremely unusual ways. I was fired into the upper atomosphere of a TF2 map from the turret rockets after attempting to rocket jump out of a window, fire at the turret, and be the goddamn <s>Batman</s> hero.

Red Turret Airlines. The only way to fly (some fatality expected)

East Coast Roadshow: Recommended Drivers

Just a quick note of praise for the team at Driven By Limo

I arranged airport transfers through Driven By Limo for Perth, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne (Brisbane was a family pickup), and it was one of the most relaxed ways to enter and exit an airport I’ve ever encountered. In Sydney, from the Kent Street Apartment to the Sydney Airport QANTAS terminal in 20 minutes, in Perth and Melbourne, record times from pickup to airport as well.

As for Canberra, there was nothing better than the certainty of a driver when I found myself returning to the capital on the sunday night before Parliament. Somewhere around 100+ people queuing for cabs on a Sunday night, and I was out of the airport and home long before the end of that queue even found the cab.

The prices can be a bit more than a standard cab (and a lot more than a train/bus transfer), but for absolutely security of transport to/from the airport, and when you need to be somewhere on time with no hassles, the DBL drivers do the job.

East Coast Roadshow: Reflections on Privilege

: Image by Dr Stephen Dann via Flickr

Privilege.

I have it, and it came to the fore whenever I found myself comfortably wandering around the streets of a strange city, taking random photos, and not cross thinking about the various police patrols that wandered past me during the day (that I notice the police patrols, security cameras, and have one eye on the interaction of law enforcement with the rest of the world is something learnt, and that I can stop to observe police interactions with relative invisibility is also a privilege).

Similarly, the sheer number of stairs I’ve encountered in the last five weeks has been eye opening in terms of thinking how the architecture skews towards the temporary able bodied status in sublime ways (and overt ways). Nothing like realising that the “accessibility ramp” is tucked away to the side of the building with the darkened overhang, garbage bins, and poor lighting to realise that this might be letter of the law, but sure isn’t spirit or the intent of accessibility.

One of the things that I have come to really appreciate about learning my trade as a feminist ally has been the liberation that feminism has provided to me from some of the cultural aspects of masculinity that I still have to struggle to overcome because they’re quite ingrained in me. A couple of things spring to mind – eye contact being one of the most amazing differences in the way that wresting myself free from the “All interactions with women need some sexualised content for me to feel comfortable with my heteronormative role” (my words). Being able to look people in the eye and not at their breasts is actually something that you’re not aware of how much of a difference it makes to the way you view women as equals until you realise that you’d previously had a mental categorisation of “people you talk to” and “breasts you’ve spoken at”. That whole thing with “My eyes are up here” is also a denial of eye contact that allows a guy (he said, speaking from experience) to depersonalise (and ‘other’) the woman in the conversation by refusing to acknowledge them through eye contact.(1,2)

The second liberating factor was a recent article skimmed in the GoogleReader that was discussing gender assumptions in the service industries, and the fact that a smile from the person working behind the counter was just that – a smile, and possibly just a forced part of their day job. Again, from what I used to think, and what I had been taught to extract from the mental processes associated with the friendly interaction with a female service staff member was massively sexualised. So once again, it was pleasant to be able to talk to the person on reception, smile, chat, and walk away with no more than a sense of “Hey, room keys. Where’s the lift?”. No added layers of non-existent subtext and assumption to create lingering doubts of “I totally could have scored with her”, and no sense of obligation to be a sleaze. Goddamn it was nice to go through a service encounter and walk out at the end without the baggage of male societal processing (and yes, I’m aware of the background tasks of patriarchy running with empty data. If I hadn’t had the code inserted in my mind, I couldn’t notice it running empty).

The trip to Wollongong seemed to have upped my awareness of these facets of my life moreso than any other part of the Roadshow. I had two days of really noticing how much more pleasant the world is when I get to treat the people in the world around me as my equal. Again, when I was interviewing four female academics (three PhD students, and a professor), the liberation from the assumptions of sexualisation let me hear their words without a the klaxon bell of “HEY! SEXUALISE THIS MOMENT” going off in my head (3). For that, I thank the opportunity that the feminist blogs I read have given me to shut up, sit back, listen, learn, read and observe, and to know that it’s okay for me (privileged male) to not need to turn their conversations to being about my experiences in order to derail their activity to make it all about my experience.

That sense of liberation from not needing to speak, to be central, to assume, to think a friendly smile is something more makes my world that little bit easier to navigate, and a lot more comfortable to just have conversation without social obligation to be an asshole.

(1) Annoying, one unfortunate habit I have with eye contact is dropping my gaze to my hands when I’m explaining something complex – I’m starting to think it’s that I’m used to typing carefully when explaining complex thoughts in my work, so I look at my keyboard to see the hands are hitting the correct keys – and I do that when I’m talking now. This occasionally has me looking back up from my hands and thinking “Uh, where did I look like I was looking?”. I’m trying to be much more aware of that as it’s happening rather than post facto.

(2) Eye contact is also contextually based – not making eye contact as a sign of respect for the people who aren’t comfortable with direct eye contact overwrites any desire for direct eye contact.

(3) The period spent shift from the sexualised view of the world to a massively more desexualised one did come complete with moments of me thinking “hey, uh, am I supposed to be doing something here?”